Life Member Profile – Barry Booth
Barry Booth joined the Alpine Club of Kiama in 1966 and within two years he had been elected to a position on the committee. In 1970 he began a four-year stint as the club president and after stepping down from that role he filled the demanding and sometimes fraught booking officer’s position for eleven years, until 1986, whereupon he became the club’s property officer for three years and managed the inventory in the lodge. He was then the vice-president for a further year. During the middle and late 1970s he was a participant on the several sub-committees which were charged with investigating the possibility of the club moving to develop a second facility elsewhere in the Snowy Mountains or considerably expanding the existing lodge in Thredbo. He stepped down from his formal committee and board involvement in 1990 after more than 20 years, but he continued to be a regular participant in working bee activities at the lodge as he had been since first joining the club. He also played an important role as the club’s unofficial photographer, capturing significant moments in AGMs (like the formal awarding of life memberships) and in the lodge in Thredbo, and for a time he was a delegate to the New South Wales Ski Association. Much earlier, during the club’s first decade, he had been heavily involved in the club’s busy social life in Kiama, playing the role of Master of Ceremonies at dances on occasions and entertaining the members in musical harmony with Geoff Boxsell. He has also been to the fore as a teller of jokes and stories in the lounge room of the lodge, and during the 1990s he helped in the production of the book about the club’s story. Later, he participated in the creation of two DVDs about the club and its activities. Barry Booth’s contribution to the Kiama Alpine Club has been lengthy, multi-faceted and ongoing, and it led to his being awarded honorary life membership of the club in 1993.